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> WSWS : News & Analysis : Africa
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> Sierra Leone peace talks expose Blair's "ethical" foreign policy
>
> By Chris Talbot
> 9 June 1999
>
> Back to screen version
>
> British Prime Minister Tony Blair's moral justification for war
> obviously does not extend to the small West African country of Sierra
> Leone. A cease-fire was declared last month and peace negotiations
> with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels have now begun in
> Lom�, in nearby Togo. Both Britain and the United States have
> sanctioned these negotiations.
>
> Only last year, Blair said that Britain was "quite right" to break a
> United Nations arms embargo in sending Sandline International, a
> mercenary force, to back the Sierra Leone government of President
> Ahmed Tejan Kabbah fighting the RUF. The Labour government faced down
> a major scandal, claiming what they did was justified because the
> Kabbah regime was "democratically elected".
>
> Up until the present peace talks, British and world media reported
> extensively on RUF atrocities, while largely ignoring those committed
> by government forces. The South African Mail and Guardian, for
> example, states in a June 2 report that "independent aid workers and
> victims agree that the RUF's trademark tactics include hacking off
> people's hands, arms, legs, ears and noses, in addition to raping,
> kidnapping and burning people alive." A recent report from the French
> charity M�decines sans Fronti�res (MSF) stated that out of 56 war
> victims they were treating in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone,
> "ten had at least one hand deliberately amputated by machete". MSF
> point out that their report is about people who had survived such
> mutilations and were able to reach Freetown�the total of mutilated
> persons is far higher.
>
> The moralistic propaganda which Blair and Cook used against their
> critics to explain the hiring of Sandline has now been dropped.
> Instead, the energies of the Blair government and Clinton
> administration are being directed towards promoting the idea of
> reconciliation. The Lom� talks between President Kabbah and RUF leader
> Foday Sankoh were attended not only by representatives of the UN and
> Organisation for African Unity (OAU), but by the Reverend Jesse
> Jackson. Jackson is described as the "United States Special Envoy for
> the Promotion of Democracy in Africa". He expressed satisfaction that
> the cease-fire had been reached on the eve of the African-American
> summit, due to be held in Accra. With no explanation of why the US and
> Britain were calling off their support for the eight-year-long war,
> Jackson said, �We are coming back to our roots, our fatherland, which
> is facing several problems, but we are coming back with a lot of
> resources. In one week we are going to celebrate a new era in Nigeria.
> We will not rest until we celebrate peace in the DRC [Democratic
> Republic of Congo], in Ethiopia and elsewhere.�
>
> The Sierra Leone cease-fire and peace negotiations, it should be
> added, have received virtually no coverage in the British media.
> Throughout the pages of reports lauding the Labour government's war in
> Yugoslavia, no questions have been asked about how their self-styled
> "ethical foreign policy" has been applied in Africa. Very brief film
> clips of amputees in Freetown were shown on television news, but the
> viewer would think that this was another horrible African war with no
> obvious connection to Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. It was
> suggested that a "peace initiative" could bring some optimism to this
> war-torn country.
>
> In reality, from the end of 1997 Britain and the United States
> organised a major military offensive in Sierra Leone against the RUF.
> Fifteen thousand ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States
> Monitoring Group) troops from Nigeria, nominally in Sierra Leone as
> "peacekeepers", were deployed against the RUF with modern equipment,
> including jets and helicopters. As well as financing the Nigerian
> involvement, thousands of Sierra Leone government troops were
> regrouped and armed. Tens of thousands of traditional hunters
> (kamajors) were supplied with modern weapons to fight the RUF. British
> and US-based mercenaries, or �private security firms� as they are
> euphemistically called�Pacific Architects and Engineers as well as
> Sandline International�were also deployed in training, logistics and,
> in some cases, in direct combat. Over a hundred British military
> advisors and intelligence experts have remained in Sierra Leone
> throughout this period.
>
> Whilst a civil war has raged since 1991 between the RUF and a series
> of British and US-backed regimes�with ECOMOG support�the intervention
> last year was a major offensive. A section of the Sierra Leone army,
> led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma, had defected from the Kabbah regime,
> sided with the RUF, and seized power in May 1997. Although official UN
> diplomacy arranged negotiations with Koroma and imposed an arms
> embargo, the British and US response was to mount a military
> operation. Kabbah's regime was reinstalled in the capital and the RUF
> pursued into the northern forests.
>
> Kabbah was encouraged by his British advisors to institute a hard-line
> policy against the RUF and its supporters. Under the slogan "no peace
> without justice", two dozen soldiers were executed and 40 civilians
> sentenced to death for supporting the Koroma regime. Foday Sankoh, the
> long-standing RUF leader, was imprisoned under sentence of death.
>
> What has transpired since the beginning of this year has been a
> military debacle for the ECOMOG forces, the Kabbah regime, and their
> British and US backers. The RUF has taken control of large parts of
> the country, and in January this year was even making a push for the
> capital, Freetown. BBC reports of the Lom� talks now speak of
> protracted negotiations with the RUF representatives, a possible power
> sharing government with the rebels, a possible amnesty for soldiers
> who supported Koroma, and discussions about the release of Sankoh.
>
> A few reports are emerging regarding the scale of the humanitarian
> disaster brought about by this yearlong military intervention. An
> indication of how the war was escalated by the British and US is that
> whilst 20,000 people are estimated to have died in the civil war since
> 1991, 5,000 of these deaths occurred since January this year when
> ECOMOG stopped the RUF taking Freetown.
>
> A May 20 report from the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance
> states that almost one half of the country's 4.5 million inhabitants
> have had to flee their homes. It estimates that between 700,000 and 1
> million people are now officially "internally displaced persons".
> UNHCR report that approximately 460,000 Sierra Leoneans are refugees
> living in neighbouring countries. 12,000 of these have registered as
> refugees in Guinea since last December.
>
> The January attack on Freetown left the city without electricity,
> telephones and very little food or water. With the rainy season
> approaching (May to November), aid agencies have been airlifting
> plastic sheeting to provide temporary shelter for the displaced
> persons camps around Freetown. A serious outbreak of cholera is
> anticipated, due to the large concentrations of people living together
> without proper sanitation.
>
> The plight of people in the rebel-held areas, where aid agencies had
> no access before the cease-fire, is likely to be dire. Fighting has
> disrupted the economy in a country where most people live off the
> land, growing vegetables, nuts, cocoa and rice. The scale of the
> terror tactics of the RUF is not yet known in terms of civilian
> casualties, but it has certainly exacerbated the food crisis.
>
> How did the RUF return from their jungle bases in the north of Sierra
> Leone to mount a country-wide offensive, pushing a large military
> force with far superior weaponry to the brink of defeat? The RUF were
> able to do so because ECOMOG had little control over the rural areas
> in the north. The traditional kamajor hunters, armed to fight against
> the RUF, are only based in the south of Sierra Leone. From their
> northern retreats, the RUF advanced its guerrilla offensive on major
> towns and roads towards the end of last year, scoring a series of
> victories against ECOMOG. Increasing casualties amongst the underpaid
> ECOMOG troops, fighting a war they had little interest in, led to
> demoralisation.
>
> Having gained control of the key diamond areas, previously defended by
> Sandline on behalf of international corporations, the RUF were able to
> trade diamonds as well as palm oil and cacao for arms, ammunitions,
> foodstuffs and petrol. With apparently no Western backers, their only
> foreign support is in neighbouring Liberia, where President Charles
> Taylor has unofficially allowed them to establish bases in return for
> such lucrative trade. Although they started out as a small group in
> the 1980s with Libyan backing and a policy of overthrowing the corrupt
> and hated Western-backed regime of Joseph Momoh, the RUF has long
> since abandoned any pretence of winning political support on a popular
> programme. They have looted the regions where they are based and
> terrorised the local population into forced labour, as well as to
> fight for them.
>
> The deeper reason for the turn in the RUF's fortunes lies in the
> historic legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Regimes like that of
> Kabbah, based on a tiny rich elite, can only survive with Western
> military backing. Sierra Leone's economy was driven into an
> impoverished and indebted state in the 1970s and 80s. External debt
> grew to $1.2 billion, as the IMF attempted to squeeze even more
> repayments out of Kabbah's regime when it was first installed in 1996.
> Diamond production, the country's only valuable asset for world
> markets, was sold off to international corporations.
>
> Britain and the US have no intention of following up the latest peace
> initiative with anything other than further crippling IMF programmes
> and the restoration of diamond production to global companies�even if
> under a different regime. The other major interest of Western powers
> in this part of Africa that has cut across the war with the RUF is the
> long sought after "democratic" transformation taking place in Nigeria.
> As the dominant country in West Africa, Nigeria provided the ECOMOG
> forces in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. This was a major undertaking
> for Nigeria's military rulers, for which they obtained substantial
> financial backing from Britain and the US. The delicate transition
> from military to civilian rule in Sierra Leone has brought to the fore
> extensive grievances against the use of the Nigerian army as an agency
> of imperialism, including their loss of credibility and the mounting
> death toll in this impoverished African country.
>
>
>
>
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